The GitHub Copilot harness is now generally available in Microsoft Copilot Studio. This gives makers an additional orchestration option for building agents and workflows that require more advanced reasoning, planning, coding-intensive work, and agentic execution.

This release is additive. Existing Copilot Studio agents and deployments will continue to function as they do today and makers can continue to create and manage agents using the Standard and Copilot Chat harness. No existing agents will be modified, migrated, or automatically moved to a different harness as part of this rollout.

Release details

With this release, Copilot Studio evolves into a multi-harness platform, allowing makers to choose the harness best suited to their scenario:

Copilot Chat harness: Used to customize Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences using the same harness as Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. These agents are included with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licenses.
Standard harness: The existing Copilot Studio agent experience for conversational AI and structured business-process scenarios. These agents are included with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licenses or available on consumption using the existing rate card.
GitHub Copilot harness: An advanced harness optimized for complex business processes, long-running tasks, sophisticated reasoning, coding-intensive scenarios, and agentic workflows. These agents are always billed using usage-based billing, regardless of Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing.

Why this matters for partners

Customers are asking for more reliable ways to move from experimentation to production-ready agents that can handle multi-step business processes. The GitHub Copilot harness expands what partners and customers can build in Copilot Studio by adding a harness option designed for more advanced reasoning, planning, and agentic workflow execution. At the same time, Copilot Studio continues to support existing build paths. Customers can keep using existing agents and continue creating agents with the Copilot Chat and Standard harnesses.

In addition, with the GitHub Copilot harness in Copilot Studio, Microsoft continues to enable partners to grow their usage business by adding new product value to the usage-based billing model.

Call to Action

Review theFAQ to understand what is changing, what is not changing, and how to respond to customer questions about harness selection, billing, and migration.
Use theCopilot Studio Cost Management Guide when discussing GitHub Copilot harness usage-based billing, Copilot Credits, or PPAC configuration with customers.

Additional Resources

Copilot Studio: GitHub Copilot harness is now generally available

AI Business Solutions Partner Marketing Team